Stephen Starr: Disappearing from a war zone

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An undated video posted to YouTube shows gunmen with journalist Austin Tice, who had been reporting for American news organizations in Syria until his disappearance in August. Reports indicate he is in Syrian government custody.

It’s been three months since Austin Tice’s parents have had contact with him, three months since the freelance journalist from Houston disappeared outside Damascus while covering the war in Syria.

Marc and Debra Tice held a news conference from Beirut last week to appeal for information on their son’s whereabouts. “Is he well?” asked Marc. “How can we contact him? And how can we return him to our family?”

There are no easy answers, and his disappearance underscores the risks taken by independent reporters with limited experience of a country.

Austin Tice, 31, a former Marine, disappeared in a Damascus suburb in mid-August, close to a town I once called home as an accredited freelance journalist before I left Syria in February. Days before he vanished, Tice noted on Twitter: “Aside from Rastan, where there was a state of open war, I think Jadaydat Artouz was the most dangerous place I’ve been here. Glad to be out.”

Tice has clearly been apprehended, but we don’t know exactly by whom. A video appeared online in September showing Tice being held by a group of armed men. The U.S. State Department believes he is being held by Syrian government forces, though it could not authenticate the footage. Terrorism experts believe the video was staged.

Having lived in Syria for five years, including the first 12 months of the revolution, I am astonished by the risks foreign journalists continue to take when reporting inside the country, particularly given the nature of this conflict.

What makes Syria so dangerous, and so difficult to report, is that the combat fronts dividing the warring forces shift every day. A town liberated by rebels today can be reoccupied by government forces within hours. A village with no rebel presence can be shelled simply because there have been anti-government demonstrations there. I have seen government checkpoints erected for only a few minutes before being moved to the next intersection down the highway. The town I lived in, 11 miles from the capital, saw regular anti-regime protests while all the time under complete government control.

Northern Syria is different. There, police stations and government offices have closed. Military and security buildings have been gutted. But in government-controlled towns, life continues much as normal. The 17 internal security organizations still operate. There are the military police, the secret police, networks of informers and numerous checkpoints manned by soldiers and tanks to contend with.

Reporting in these two separate areas of Syria requires very different approaches. It’s hardly a coincidence that Tice went missing shortly after entering a government-controlled region.

During his four months of reporting in Syria, Tice brought to life a people at war with its government. His reports were sometimes funny, always insightful. He covered stories I could only dream of doing from my government-controlled town.

Yet the profile he built by appearing on radio and television and in numerous high-profile print publications could not go unnoticed by the Syrian government’s ministry for information — a department I came to know very well during my time there.

Even reporters with decades of experience in the Middle East didn’t try what Tice did, by crossing from rebel- to government-controlled territory while maintaining a prominent public profile. Some reporters entered Syria over the Turkish border to the north before slipping out weeks later. Others spent shorter stretches of time there, three days in Homs or a week in Damascus under government supervision, and then to the airport and back to London, Paris or Washington.

In Syria, foreign reporters simply cannot afford to be transparent and hope to continue working and traveling as normal. The Syrian government has a room dedicated to collecting and reading news stories about the country from around the world. Those employees do not approve of news that criticizes the regime. Tice’s reports brought such insight to what was happening inside the country; he had to have become a target.

I hope Tice is released to safety soon. I also hope his capture prompts other freelance journalists to think carefully before diving into complex war zones such as Syria.

Stephen Starr is a journalism fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and the author of “Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising,” published in August. His email address is stephenstaarr@neareastquarterly.com.

The following is excerpted from a post Austin Tice wrote on his Facebook page July 25 about his motivation for going to Syria. The Washington Post published the post in August, with the permission of his parents.

Sometime between when our granddads licked the Nazis and when we started putting warnings on our coffee cups about the temperature of our beverage, America lost [its] pioneering spirit. We became a fat, weak, complacent, coddled, unambitious and cowardly nation. I went off to two wars with misguided notions of patriotism and found in both that the first priority was to never get killed, something we could have achieved from our living rooms in America with a lot less hassle.

So that’s why I came here to Syria, and it’s why I like being here now, right now, right in the middle of a brutal and still uncertain civil war. Every person in this country fighting for their freedom wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge that death could visit them at any moment. They accept that reality as the price of freedom. They realize there are things worth fighting for, and instead of sitting around wringing their hands about it, or asking their lawyer to file an injunction about it, they’re out there just doing it. … They live with greater passion and dream with greater ambition because they are not afraid of death.

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